Essential Skills for 21st Century Survival: Part 2: Environmental Scanning

We recently discussed Pattern Recognition and the role it plays in understanding and decision making. The next topic in this 12 part series is pulled out of the Futures Thinking toolbox:

::Environmental Scanning::

Traditionally, environmental scanning is explained within a business context as a strategic approach to acquiring information in order to stay current on events, emerging trends, and external factors that could influence or impact an organization. It basically means paying attention to what’s going on within your industry, monitoring what your competitors are doing, what your customers are saying, and being sensitive to potential threats or opportunities along the way.

I recently came across an essay titled A new framework for environmental scanning, which presents a more holistic approach to this process. The author references the work of Ken Wilber, the developor of Integral Theory, who has created a framework for looking at ‘ways of knowing’ which he breaks down into four quadrants. The image above is a simplified sketch I made after looking at his version and another one I saw here.

The area usually professionally addressed is the lower right quadrant, which looks at trends in the large scale systems that are constantly in play. [The acronym ‘STEEP’ is used to remember the categories – Social, Technological, Environmental, Economic, and Political]. Many of us are active online scanners already, and there are a multitude of tools to aid the process. You can set up RSS feeds, Google Alerts, subscribe to listservs and newsletters, or visit sites which aggregate sites by topic, like Alltop, or use services where users do the aggregation, like Twine. Futurist John Mahaffie has already written a very thorough post about this, Environmental Scanning in the Digital Age, so I’ll try not to do too much repeating.

The only tool I’ll add, because he didn’t mention it in his post, is Twitter. It’s become my favorite online platform for shared discovery, not just because there’s all that real-time information flowing, but because there’s all those real life people talking! Though the format is very short-form (only 140 characters), quick opinions or insights around a topic can be exchanged, allowing you to consider a range of perspectives. This kind of interaction also shifts your scanning out of that purely objective quadrant and into the subjective and collective ones. Evaluating trends and statistics is valuable, but so is exploration of cultural values and assumptions that change as a result of new information or circumstances.

Moving offline, the scanning process is about being aware of your immediate environment and exposing yourself to situations where ideas can cross-pollinate and new connections can be formed. This can be anything from meetups to conferences or other networking events where you have a chance to share ideas with other thinkers in your field of interest.

By engaging with another skill covered later in the series, mindfulness, your entire life becomes a scanning process. Staying mindfully focused in the present keeps you in touch with your own thoughts and emotions, and aware of the interactions and relationships between yourself and other people. Understanding what makes people tick and why they think what they think is as important of a skill as understanding the larger forces operating within society.

Why is it important?

Well, if pattern recognition is a skill that leads to better decision making, environmental scanning is a process to help detect patterns. The world is becoming more fully interdependent, and it’s not enough to only pay attention to one’s own field or industry anymore. The more comprehensive an understanding you can get of the “big picture,” the better position you’ll be in to anticipate and adapt to change, keeping you or your organization competitive.

Yet there is an undepicted perspective in the diagram. Although there may be no way to show the creator’s perspective, it seems to me that this perspective is grounded on a plane than transcends that of the four quadrants.

So a question comes to mind. Let’s say you rotate the diagram and create an oblique 3D view that shows the integrative creating/observing plane, as well as your original 2D diagram.

Then how can one visually depict the new (missing) perspective – the one from which the 3D view has been drawn?

It seems to me that the meta creator/observer perspective relative to whatever is observed cannot be expressed in visual form without infinite recursion. Yet it may be the most fundamental pattern to keep in mind as we scan an omnicentric environment for patterns, especially as what are non-sentient things – what we now see as “its” – evolve to become participants in a creating and observing universe.

This idea has generally appealed to me as we’ve been discussing Junto and the evolution of a concurrent profile/reputation system. I’ve never seen anything like it on the web, but wouldn’t it be interesting if there was?

when i first saw http://smart.fm/, i thought, now why don’t they have something like this not just for learning, but for evolving consciousness? i know there is such thing as machines and videogames for meditation and biofeedback, but I haven’t seen something that would be comprehensive, including not only your resume-type skills and experience, but also deeper mental/spiritual work you were doing. (this is nearly heretical to even speak of in our society, which has always baffled me. when i got my undergrad in Psychology, I felt a disappointment vibe from my family… they wanted me to be a business major so i would be equipped to do “real work.” well, i am of the opinion that mental health and exploring one’s “essence” is what gives you the foundation for a fulfilling and inspired life, so i really really want to do SOMETHING that might bring attention to how important it is.) in my mind, by developing this generative dialogue platform, and then getting many people involved in participating in higher level conversations, we’ll begin creating a groundwork for even better stuff.

one of the main things that concerns me is how do we determine levels of consciousness, and who is responsible for deciding where anyone is? when i described this idea to someone the other day, their response was “Sounds elitist.” Ouch. It’s supposed to be the opposite of elitism. It’s supposed to be an opportunity for people who want to be open and cooperative to engage with each other and pull each other to even higher levels.

what i’ve always had in my head was a little visualization, that could even be turned into a facebook app/badge that people could post on their profiles that would be called “Emergence Level” or something like that. and it would show different things you were working on internally, different insights and aha moments you had and what those did to elevate you to new levels. maybe i should go spend time with some tibetan monks and see what their process is….. and actually, I have one nearby – the Chuan Yen Buddhist Monastery, which houses the largest buddha statue in the western hemisphere. very cool place….

i’ve got just a few loose threads i have to focus on and then we’ll be back to Junto.

If you’re looking for a non-elitist framework, the New Mind Mirror program that Edward Craig is working on builds off of the Leary Interpersonal Grid for the diagnosis of personality. They have expanded it to include spiritual/transpersonal orientation as well.

When we talk developmental processes, people will always make the elitism claim. Ken Wilber attempts to deflect that by saying yes, it is an elitism, but an elitism to which all are invited. I would further say that it meets everyone where they come from. Kohlberg and Graves both had to come up with quantitative ways to investigate the structural stages of development in morals and values, respectively.

One also has to keep in mind the different waves of development described by the Integral framework. They have a degree of interdependence as well, so someone, according to Wilber, cannot reach a certain degree of development in their moral understanding, without first having reached a sustaining level of cognitive development.

I believe that a slight misinterpretation of the Four Quadrant map has led to the seeing a lack of a creator perspective. Any perspective that can be held falls within that of the individual-interior. The meta-level of thinking falls to that of what Wilber refers to as Vision-Logic.

>>a slight misinterpretation of the Four Quadrant map has led to the seeing a lack of a creator perspective. Any perspective that can be held falls within that of the individual-interior. The meta-level of thinking falls to that of what Wilber refers to as Vision-Logic.

Thanks for clarifying – it sounds like a useful recategorization, although I’m not fully understanding.

Aren’t our understandings of the Vision-Logic meta-level also part of the individual-interior perspective?

I definitely agree with that statement, and I did not mean to discount your mention of the recursive element at all. It seems to me that at each stage of development, definitely within the cognitive stream, the application of cognition upon itself forces a reorganization to the next level of development. I certainly believe that the application of Vision logic to itself a necessary but not sufficient path to the next stage of development, which Wilber labels “Illumined Mind” or “Para-Mind” (Fig 2.4, Integral Spirituality.

I just think that a map showing these granularities of development meet different needs from those that the 4-quadrant map addresses.

I find that Twitter is an extremely effective platform to practice mindfulness and develop pattern recognition capability. The only problem I find, is to get connected to the right people who have similar objectives and have the ability to experience and express life through the understanding of paradoxes and don’t allow the peak of personal ambition to peep through their expressions.

However, I partially agree to the Environmental scanning concept since a mental framework first needs to be developed to enjoy the process. It can be overwhelming and confusing to an untrained mind. To achieve a proper balance and skill in scanning and make sense of the stream of information, one must develop a proper mental framework (or have a appropriate lens). This is because nothing can actually be rejected and if brought to the consciousness can yield wonderful results if connected through a framework.

STEEP is a framework to understand a pattern. But no pattern is static. It dynamically moves through transformation and evolution. That is the essential nature of any thing — therefore ‘interdependent arising and dissolving’. STEEP lacks the power to do so. Something more is therefore needed.

i know what you mean, finding the right people was hard at first, because i wasn’t quite sure what i was looking for. and unfortunately, people try to game systems. one person could seem authentic and interesting at first, but once you get to know them, you see they may be operating on a bit of a superficial level. i’m not an expert judge of character, but i think i’m definitely getting better. by a quick look at the types of tweets a person puts out, the way they describe themselves in their little bio, and the way they express themselves on their blo is a fairly reasonable indicator of where they’re at mentally. i’ve been surprised by people though in both directions – getting to know someone who eventually showed true colors that were not quite what i’d expected, and also the opposite, where someone seemed relatively interesting and then just blew my mind with their *actual* mental level.

what i’ve found to be the best method for me is, instead of trying to find people who are authentic and interesting – just be authentic and interesting yourself. people who resonate on your frequency will find you.

re: escanning – yes, it is not enough to just get the information, hence this is a 12 part series!!!! i’m looking at different aspects in each post, but at the end i’ll bring it all together again. of course, scanning without synthesis is just noise.

STEEP is just one way to think about which large-scale system a piece of information fits into. and of course, since everything is dynamic and interrelated, info flows across systems. if we’re talking about climate change, it’s not just in the Environment category, it’s in all of them. but you can think about the different aspects of the issue by thinking of the different systems.

social: what kind of individual or societal practices contribute to or alleviate global warming?
technological: what kind of tools can we build that will help us change our behaviors for the better?
economic: what are the financial impacts to people and organizations to address this?
environmental: what impact is this having on Nature?
political: what policies should be enforced to encourage social responsibility?

are there other questions to ask beyond these? sure, there are always more questions. you can get into some deeply philosophical or metaphysical ones. no model is perfect – they’re more like training wheels to get you going, and then you expand out and start thinking for yourself.

Agree. The diagram in this post does not seem to show the dynamic forces that lead to probes and unfoldings by each node in the four quadrants. (I believe these dynamic forces are also at work in the ultimately “undepictable” reflections of the nodes in an omnicentric universe in the creating/observing layers mentioned in my reply above. )

Higher level forms of physical organization – and higher forms of intelligence that lead to discovery of generalizable rules – seem to be happening in ways that go against entropic trends. Spiritually, we may be also experiencing the emergence of higher forms of empathy and consciousness despite the entropic flow.

As best I can tell, the drive to higher levels of organization may be driven by “selfish” genes, memes, and lumines (meme-like qualities of spirit) that are evolving vessels and generative scripts to more successfully spread. More on this possible triadic consilience is in a comment I made on the Memehacking blog at http://j.mp/3h7BOp .

What do you and other EBDers see as the best ways to depict the unfolding, dynamic patterns in the environment?

Environmental scanning is definitely a must have for organizational sustenance and innovation. The speak I often use is ‘peripheral vision’ — it means the same thing but I like it better because it provides a broader view of environmental scanning – the environment in consideration is not just the present, but the past, present, and future.

Great framework. The only other point I would add is that environmental scanning at an individual level is different from scanning at an organizational level. For the latter, it is not just enough to scan but certain processes and filters have to be build in to catch the weak signals. In other words, pattern recognition does not happen by default as a result of scanning unless activated by the right infrastructure.

P.S: Just as a fyi – John has one short post on Twitter and Environmental Scanning (http://bit.ly/3Y2pLo) but more from a foresight channel perspective. You might already have seen it.

Peripheral Vision – i like that too!! i was going to mention in the post that i feel like Environmental Scanning is a bit of a cold and clunky term, and if anyone had a suggestion for a better one then i’m listening….

in a literal sense, when people lose peripheral vision they get tunnel vision, so it’s a good metaphor for staying open to the big picture.

at the same time, in futures speak, environmental scanning is talking about looking at the now, and uses the terms forecasting and backcasting to talk about considerations of the future and past.

i’m always curious about how much wordsmithing to do, and how much preservation of already existing terms to use. sometimes i don’t like to use words we have, because everyone already has an idea of what it means. (i.e. your and monica’s conversation about the meaning of the word “intuition”) ;)

Me & Monica have reached a truce on our perspectives on intuition :-). Hey, that is the beauty of an open-minded discussion: you say your piece – you listen – see the overlaps and differences – see if you can reconcile – and if you cannot, there is nothing wrong in following multiple pathways. Each can lead to knowledge and discovery.

On the environment scanning topic, you mention:
“at the same time, in futures speak, environmental scanning is talking about looking at the now, and uses the terms forecasting and backcasting to talk about considerations of the future and past.”

I would challenge any futurist who says they use backcasting to talk about considerations of the past. Backcasting is normally used to envision a future state and then work backwards to the present state so that the organization or individual has a pathway to that future state. It does not delve into the past.

And that is why I am a bit leery of the term ‘environmental scanning’. Folks are exceptionally good at studying the present. A small percentage of them are also good at envisioning the future. But there are very few who are good end-to-end: learn from the past, study & expand the present, and envision & project into the future.

[For the die-hards fans of the term, I am not against using it as long as it is properly defined as to what it should mean]

To tie this one more way to the previous item about pattern matching and to my videos: Only in the first quadrant (the one labeled “IT”) can (Scientific and Reductionist and Logic-based) Models be created and used.

Everything in the other three quadrants is “Bizarre” by my definition (see Artificial Intuition site and/or videos) and therefore we are forced to use Patterns, Pattern Matching, and Intuition in order to deal with the phenomena in them.

yes, like mark had mentioned above, the quadrant model is flat and limited – a 3D model would be much more interesting, which could show different things to think about, and different ways of thinking about them.

Sorry Monica, but I have to disagree completely. We have numerous models describing the development of different waves of interiority. From the Wisdom traditions, we have the Theraveda Four-path model of the stages of Enlightenment, the Jnana model of the stages of concentration, the 7-Chakra model of the development of psycho-spiritual energy, the Taoist t’an t’ien model, the NeoPlatonic emanations of God, and the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, just to name a few. The we have Clare Graves research into the development of values, which he applies to both individual-interiors and collective-interiors, and Lawrence Kohlberg’s stages of moral development, both of which have an internal validity and research-based statistical evidence to back them up.

Cole,
Interesting that you mention these — something I had skirted around in these posts:-).

But since you bring it out, I have to say that say that a couple of these are definitely which I would have mentioned myself. I don’t debate on it as it is not an easy concept to talk – unless one is also ready to talk about Brahman, Athman, Tao, Qi, Taiji etc. — which to most would be a “rolling your eyes” conversation.

I really see it as two paths. Those who believe in the adage that only scientifically proven facts are “truths” and the rest is mystic or hogwash. And those who believe that there is more to us than science, experiments, and proofs. I belong to the latter group. In the case of our mind – I believe that to get mastery over the mind, we first have to understand what it is and how it works and the games it plays on us. And I also believe that a lot of this understanding is gained not from experimentation – which at best can explore only a fragment of our mind – but by introspection, concentration, and meditation.

And before anyone strikes me down – I love academic, medical and other research on abstract concepts – and know that they have played a critical role in advancing our society in terms of how we think, solutions to certain diseases etc. All I am saying is that while this is good to get deeper into one area, to get a better grasp of your mind as a whole – there is nothing better than you looking at yourself and focusing on your mental moods, states, condition etc.

Glad to hear it Ned! I honestly don’t think we even need to get to discussions about Tao/Spirit to realize that human interiority necessarily shares deep structures among individuals and that we can make reliable inferences about these structures. Honestly, I shake my head at individuals who assert the phenomenological models of the Wisdom traditions without actively validating them themselves, just as I shake my head at those who claim such models impossible.

The structural models, like those of Kohlberg and Graves, I find endlessly fascinating. The individual development through them happens over such a scale of time that the investigation of them requires statistical measures with large enough sample sets for a good effect strength. Developing these methodologies really took heroic efforts.

As I scanned the comments, a couple of word data points jumped out at me and engendered top of the mind responses:

Vanessa :”if pattern recognition is a skill that leads to better decision making,”

And yet a fundamental problem of of terrible decision making is bad patterns.
e.g the Best and the Brightest syndrome in the context of the Vietnam War, The War on Terror, or Drugs. And the groupthink in the Financial Meltdown that drove prices to silly levels.

Openworld : we scan an omnicentric environment for patterns,
I’m not sure what you mean by an “omnicentric environment” .

Vanessa : how do we determine levels of consciousness, and who is responsible for deciding where anyone is?

My $.02 is that “levels’ is somehow related to behavior in the past which create a pattern for a plausible expectation of future behavior. Predicting future behavior is the secret sauce of the value created by good patterns. It’s at the crux of risk mitigation. In think in the cognitive space that is internet, the risks are involved with the going forward expectation of wasted time and focus.

Dibyendu De: I find that Twitter is an extremely effective platform to practice mindfulness and develop pattern recognition capability.

That is 100% consistent with my experience. The way I think the process is working(2me) is I scan for interesting(2me). A click on the ilnk.me shortener indicates it is “interesting(2 some number of U’s. A RT indicates agreement. An @ indicates ” I’m open to a convo.” a cc: indicates (FYR – to get on your radar)

As time and interest allows RT and an @ can evolve to a series of @ s, which might evolve to “twitter Tennis ( see #TwitTen and #TwitTenLagos ”

Openworld : “the drive to higher levels of organization may be driven by “selfish” genes, memes, and lumines (meme-like qualities of spirit) that are evolving vessels and generative scripts to more successfully spread.”

My sense is that this will turn out to be a very useful framework. The work done on viral memes is pretty far along. the patterns of biological evokution could lead to a biomimicry approach to organizing communication. it has been very useful in the worlds of physical engineering. The lumines is new(2me) but is intriguing(2me)

Ned Kumar : environmental scanning at an individual level is different from scanning at an organizational level.

you just gave me another idea for Junto. as the ideas that are shared/built in the space get logged on a concept map, it would be awesome to have a series of symbols representing various cognitive biases, so that once the people have thought of a “great” idea or insight, they can then go back and consider ways that it could be wrong.

the other thing with the platform is that it’s public & collaborative, so other people listening in who aren’t emotionally attached to the ideas being formed can offer their perspectives, which may offer even more challenges to the assumptions the 2 in the convo may have formed. it’s an interesting way to have checks and balances.

>> it would be awesome to have a series of symbols representing various cognitive biases, so that once the people have thought of a “great” idea or insight, they can then go back and consider ways that it could be wrong.

Here’s a page with an embedded, wiki-style 3D Debategraph to show what’s possible on these lines:

If anyone wants to help insert a Debategraph on our interim EBD Wiki for a test drive, I can post a link there to a PBWiki widget . It would be fund to try it out on an actual EBD discussion (meaningful look at Michael J)…

Also, regarding your idea idea of tagging “great” items for contention – and the problem Monica mentioned of “skinny” (shrinking columns) in the replies-to-replies on the EBD blog itself — I’m wondering whether there could be a spinoff agreement for such discussions.

A vibrant debate to be taken into a #TwitterTennis and/or an interactive 3D Debategraph, if the participants so wished.

So suppose one looks at those “dots” Easy for anyone to define. Born. Coming of Age. Started Family. Day Job: My bet is that connecting those dots to get a pretty good idea of their perspective is not that hard. Since people will connect those dots based on their own Space/Time it could get interesting.

I left out the most revealing data point: Franklin achieved as recurring revnue stream in In 1748, at the age of 42! He put in his 30 years of day job, but started at 10 instead of 25 or 30, as we do now in the West.

“he retired from printing and went into other businesses. He created a partnership with his foreman, David Hall, which provided Franklin with half of the shop’s profits for 18 years. This lucrative business arrangement provided leisure time for study, and in a few years he had made discoveries that gave him a reputation with the educated throughout Europe and especially in France.”

BeeDocs has an elegant, navigable way to show a 3D timelines of events (screenshot here http://j.mp/cuA37t ).

Their timegraphs can be exported now as media file, but a lighter web-based solution should be out by the end of this year.

I’ve been hungering for such quickly-scannable timelines to be included in user profiles for socnet members (and for tribe profiles as well).

Ideally, for individuals, the profiles would include tabs for three navigable timelines. One tab could show personal growth milestones. Another would be business/professional milestones, and a third might be civic/community.

In each tab, a different background “streamgraph” chart might be the backdrop against which the milestone events pop out. Streamgraphs are a cool way to show relative waxing/waning in the flow of interests and activities over time, kind of like those giant history wall charts showing the influence of various cultures and civilizations.

I’d love to link up with anyone who could help in building a web-based Streamgraph generator for EBD user profiles, showing how their interests have evolved.

I can create a couple of sample 3D animations based on EBD user inputs with the Bee Docs timeline maker.
For maximum value to the viewer, I am definitely hoping such user profiles can include a streamgraph-style image on the wall that shows evolving interests over time.

Is there a web based way now to do this, or perhaps include it in the #Junto project?

While there are a few differences, I was specifically responding to a comment Venessa made in her post: “..environmental scanning is a process to help detect patterns..”.

At an individual level, this is absolutely true. Your mind acts as the filter or system and converts the inputs from scan into data points which then is processed to identify patterns.

At an organizational level however, this jump does not happen defacto. (In fact this is one of the biggest challenges today which many don’t realize). We are already inundated by information overload in today’s world. Many organizations have spend millions of dollars to set up good scanning processes (aka customer360, feedback from various angles and constintuencies, competitive info, market info etc.). However, a majority of them lack the setup (infrastructure, process,people etc.) to process the information from the “environmental scanning” and identify patterns.

In short, at an organizational level the sheer scale of inputs implies that the scanning to patterns conversion will not happen unless the right system is build to support it.

Michael,
Though I did not touch on it in my previous post – intentionality is definitely another aspect of seggregation. And so is memory. As they say, a kid who burned his fingers will always be cautions of the fire. You would be amazed at how short a memory some organizations have and how easily they forget that they got burned on something only a little while ago.

Consider that the problem can be framed as a “scale independent” thinking model.
“at an organizational level the sheer scale of inputs implies that the scanning to patterns conversion will not happen unless the right system is build to support it.”

My idea is that this will not be solved either at the enterprise, in the classroom, or for the individual level with an examination of “intentionality”

Most organizations, most classrooms and many individuals don’t articulate what they want to do in the context of themselves. Mostly activity spaces – physical and cog space in which the tensions of Time and Space become visible – only what to do, what they did yesterday. They are not drawn to a goal.

My point is that focus is created by intentionality. Without intentionality there is no focus. With it, the supporting systems tend to organize themselves.

Cool point on intentionality, Michael. I feel a little ambivalent with your suggestion a lack of intention at the interprise level. In my experience with organizations, they have all worked towards distributing the vision and core-value statements, and held strategic planning sessions. Still, there did seem a lack of day-to-day intention within the groups. Have you noticed such a dissonance as well?

It seems to me that organizational structures, as well as inherent limitations of some domains, limit the alignment of individual intention.

I need to spend a little time thinking this through, but in the meantime what if “intention” is not taken as the property of a clearly delimited individual. Let’s say “intention” is a system property. In that frame an “individual” is a system, subject to constraints and with resources. Word outputs that indicate intention are less reliable than observable behaviors over an extended period of time.

In that sense, “meetings and mission statements” are word outputs that only reliably indicate that someone with power thinks it’s important to make them. The processes of the enterprises and the outputs generated are where “intention” can be observed.

I definitely feel with you here to a point, especially looking at individuals as systems as well.

I think your proposed solution brings us right back around to the beginning though, as if we infer intention from behavior without including something to measure against, then we have no grounds for saying a lack of intention leads to any issues.

A particular form of self-work I have found highly valuable uses a model of sub-personalities, matching our view of individuals as systems. Each of these sub-personalities have their own intentions, which do not always align. “Deeper” sub-personalities also have an interrupt priority, so if their “intention” conflicts with a shallower goal, they will win every time.

Vision statements may act like goals we set for ourselves as individuals, without properly scanning the environment. Since they do not account for deeper, systemic motivations, they get built up to fail.

One of the strongest things going for the 4-quadrant model comes from its reminder for us too look at both bureaucratic institutions and culture when planning our intentions. Informal channels and values play huge roles in sustaining change, and we ignore them at our peril.

Michael,
At a high-level, I can agree with your point about intentionality. But I think more than intentionality, it is the execution of intentionality that dictates it. Many orgs start with the right idea – but what is actually executed is far different from what was concieved.

Also one side note on ‘Environmental Scanning’ to ‘Pattern Recognition': I worked in the Analytics world for quite a while and to me Analytics in some ways is the bridge between scanning and recognition — simulating the processes happening in our mind. It allows us to filter inputs, create appropriate models, forecast, predict, and translate– creating manageable and interpretable patterns that can be acted on by humans. [talking purely from an organizational perspective]

I think we agree. You say “But I think more than intentionality, it is the execution of intentionality that dictates it.”

I guess I’m using the word in an unorthodox but useful(2me) way. 2me, ONLY behaviors can indicate intention at the system level. The words that various people say or publish are interesting, but mostly noise, in characterizing intent.

I think once we look at observable behavior instead of words, it’s easier to use the insights from biology , computer science and analytics to define an intentional system.

Maybe this helps to point to a more precise meaning for “intentional evolution” that Vanessa brought up in an earlier post.

Venessa, your scanning for orientation and groundwork for Junto grows in importance for me. Small networks spreading on their own will and do connect and form a larger one.

Today, I had the great honor to enjoy Hanami in Tokyo with the amazing people of LivingDreams.jp. Found resonance on the book Wave Rider by Harrison Owen and your Junto concept. This communication discipline, possibly a simple version of it, may be relevant to rather effortlessly produce materials for the personalized education David Kelly envisions. Watch the last video, bottom of the page at http://www.21foundation.com/2121-the-movie

Folks are exceptionally good at studying the present. A small percentage of them are also good at envisioning the future. But there are very few who are good end-to-end: learn from the past, study & expand the present, and envision & project into the future.

>>very few who are good end-to-end: learn from the past, study & expand the present, and envision & project into the future.

A great point. Perhaps profiles in EBD (and other socnets) might let users say which of the above skills they feel most at home with? Having a profile template that is sensitive to self-declared past, present and future specializations of members might be a way for socnets to better search and invite insights on opportunities and issues at hand.

There might also be room for user profiles to indicate knowledge domains/areas of specialization. As an example, I’m pretty knowledgeable about the past, present and (I think) possible futures of free zones and free cities, but would be hesitant to make such a sweeping claim to Resilient Communities, which is another areas of increasing interest.

Venessa, do you think a Junto on the past, present and future of user profiles in socnets could be one of the first out the gate? You, Gavin and Spiro would be ideal presenters or (prolific!) commentators on the subject. Also, is there news on a target date for the beta Junto platform?

Just wanted to add a few more brush strokes to stress the fact that peripheral vision or environmental scanning is an aggregated set of activities and each of the components – learning from the past, studying the present, and envisioning the future has multiple attributes.

As an example, learning from the past refers not only to the successes but to the failures as well (for e.g in the socnet world, my failures might hold key information that will make some else succeed in what they are trying to accomplish). Also, it is critical both for individuals and organizations to understand where they are coming from, as that has an impact on the path they will take towards the future.

Similarly, studying the present has also multiple connotations. In most cases, folks and organizations are passive scanners in that they wait for outside signals to come to them. And as such, the feedback they get from this kind of scanning only reinforces their existing beliefs. In the peripheral vision world, one becomes an active scanner in that their desire to learn and answer out-of-the-box questions pushes the scanning frontiers to the edge of the periphery. Another useful way to study the present is to use splatter vision which uses a broad vision but then keeps a look out for any deviations (the analogy would be looking simultaneously at the forrest and the trees).

And lastly envisioning the future also has multiple aspects. One is obviously keeping track of the trends. But then there is the whole concept of identifying weak signals – or information from the far out which normally does not get amplified but might have good information about a future state.

So if one wants to have a good peripheral vision, they have to learn from their mistakes & successes, keep an open mind, push the edges of their scans, and be alert for any out of the ordinary deviations.

Spiro,
Excellent point. It helps explain the critical nature of developing a historical imagination. Much neglected in our schools and in our business who are focused either on NOW, THE NEXT BIG THING, the quarterly profit statement or the next high stakes test.

Ya, I agree with that vis-a-vis Spiro’s comment. The ability to maintain a broader ‘vision’ of things can and should be taught early on — and not when one gets into trouble or sees trouble looming ahead.

If there is one thing i have learned from my trials and tribulations it’s nothing happens until it consciously happens.

The past, and the future are happening now. the expansion of presence makes the past and the future mean something in the now.

The only way one can expand the present is to be present. If there is a side bar quality from all of this, i would say “detachment” is requird to make the present expand and allow all the great things that have been left behind from past learning experiencing and allow that to connect with a holistic future, but that will only happen if it’s now present and conscious and alive in the daily activities of conversing.

Nicely said and consistent with what I think I’ve learned from my own life. One way I wrap words around the experience is to see my point of view created from a web of memes. It’s the same web that creates the my view of the future. But, to your point, it has to be rooted in the moment. Without that rootedness, one can get to dangerous places with nasty consequences.

Hi Venessa – Apologies for absence, have been rushing to get a book finished against a too-tight deadline.

Another great post as usual. Agree strongly with you re the value of Twitter – that’s my main env.scanning tool at present.

Also agree that the Wilber model urgently needs to be more than two-dimensional. I usually show it as a tetradian – the four internal axes of a tetrahedron – so that we if we place any pair of axes in opposition for the purposes of comparison, it automatically places the other pair in opposition, giving a much richer view than Wilber’s literally flat model. (Works even better if you make it up as a little cardboard tetrahedron and literally rotate the views in your hand.)

The way you’ve drawn it is better too, without Wilber’s misleading hierarchy of ‘levels’. (Wilber’s ‘levels’ actually make more sense as sliders on an audio-mixing desk – different mixes of different characteristics, rather than a linear progression.)

Will be able to join in the conversation more once this book is out of the way – in the meantime, keep up the great work! :-)

So you got me thinking about “intent” and this is is what I thunk so far.

I think I’m using “intent” to replace “function” as used in the sociological tradition as represented by Talcott Parsons, Max Weber and Marx. The difference is to replace the notion of individuals and enterprises as essentially unique and separable things. The usual metaphor is that an organization is the framework for individuals to execute their intents. The way I’m looking at it is that an individual is actually a system of systems. To describe their going forward as a result of the intent created in words by the brain doesn’t capture what’s really going on.

As for an individual, so for other systems. In that metaphor the authentic intent of a business is to make money. The authentic intent of a non profit is to serve their clients. The authentic intent of government is to provide a safe environment for their citizens to do what they want to do. The authentic intent of an individual is to have a nice day.

I’ve framed it as – systems live in an activity space that is made visible by the tensions created between a physical space and cognitive space in the service of moving forward. No movement is the indicator of death for individuals, communities and enterprises.

It’s a thin line between anthropomorphism and talking of the intent of an organization. But I think it’s useful to try. I’ve been in many convos with designers who say ” That cover wants to be simpler” It sounds like bs, but in fact it points to the interaction of the artist and the object. I’ve heard designers say ” Type has a voice.” which points to a similar reality. One might also say “What does that garden, child or organization want to be when it grows up.”

Maybe it’s a way to get a more precise picture of an “organization’s dna.” And what reality we’re trying to point to with “intentional evolution” and “mindfulness” What does your body want instead of what do I want.”

I found at data point this morning that helps give sense to “The authentic intent of an individual is to have a nice day.” It’s in an story at the New York Times about the renewed activity among medical researchers in the use of that is well worth the read. The tweets :

“the largest conference on psychedelic science held in the United States in four decades” { NYT http://ilnk.me/2308 }

“the really good things in life will happen if you just show up and share your natural enthusiasms with people” { NYT http://ilnk.me/2308 }

Makes me think that what we groping towards might be “a science of psychedelics.”

Michael,
Interesting reads definitely. The only thing I would argue with is that [imho] we don’t need to inject hallucinogens psilocybin to get to that state. I might be in the minority, but it is precisely this sort of detachment and higher-level of consciousness that can be attained by practicing activities like deep meditation.

Nothing against the docs – it is just that I always feel that a ‘drug-induced’ state can never be long-lasting. It is better to train oneself and reach to a higher level in situ, meaning without disturbing anything else in your biological system.

Totally in line with your ‘intent’ piece – I think we are on parallel thoughts. In my earlier comment, I said “..it is critical both for individuals and organizations to understand where they are coming from..”. In a way I was referring to your intent. Every individual and/or organization has a heritage that they cannot escape and one we should not try to escape. It is critical we understand this and see the natural evolution before trying to mold or morph it to something else.

Not really the place for it here, but I think you lack experience in creating a useful relationship between meditation and entheogenic use. I also read a possible confusion between states and stages of development. For example, in Dr. Martin’s experience, information conveyed through an altered state led to a sustained change of perspective, making a new stage of development.

Even if the highly questionable assertion that deep-meditation can get one the same insights as entheogens, it cannot do so as fast or as thoroughly. I think the urgency of our situation impels us to get as many people on to entheogen bandwagon as fast as safely possible.

Agree – Entheogens can get things done faster (though I would debate the “as thoroughly” part).

Also, I didn’t say I was against its use. The analogy I would use is the flippant use of Tylenol by many to quickly get rid of a headache (symptom) instead of understanding what might have caused it (root issue). So all I was saying is that under certain conditions maybe the use of entheogens/hallucinogens might be okay – but I (and this is gain my own personal opinion) don’t think it should be used just to get folks to that state. (Also, you and I might have a different approach to addressing the “urgency of the situation” :-) ).

One of the side benefits I see here is the acceptance that there is a “higher level of consciouness” and trance like state of our mind. This has been said all along for centuries in the Eastern texts and teachings but I know many just didn’t buy into it.

I think a lot of our maladies (for example, depression) can be resolved if we can teach people how to reach to this higher state. Most of us are only in touch with the surface of our mind and so react strongly to various emotional states – anger, grief, happiness etc. Once you get to a higher state, one becomes more stable and learn to handle all emotions in a more “detatched” way.

About 10 years ago I remember hearing that in the agora of ancient Greece, buildings used the first person in their identifiers — “I am ____.” I think you (and they) are on to something.

If we’re moving to an Internet of increasingly sentient and co-creative things, the unfolding may well map out and align with systemic patterns of beauty.

Christopher Alexander’s Nature of Order books on “alive and whole design,” I think, are a promising start in all this.

Although the patterns we discover in systems can be beautiful, I do think they are at least implicitly manifest in individuals (and in subsystems that comprise individuals, etc.- “turtles all the way down.”)

If so, intent can be seen as pervasive in the system – to find and move on value-preserving transformations (like joining this socnet, for example) that enable fuller appreciation of, and resonance with, these patterns.

Bringing up the agora is very useful. In a convo I’ve been having with @readywriting we’ve been discussing the value of close reading in the frame of prisoner education. The object in question is Homer. He’s a PhD but has left an institution of “higher ed”. I like to think of him as a growing cohort of “Indy Academics” to be populated by retiring baby boomers.

At any rate, he pointed out that the first word of the Iliad in the Greek is “wrath.” That was a completely new reading for me. And provides a lens that I think should work with at risk kids.

Maybe we’re looking at signal v noise problem. The signals we get from the beginning of a major societal evolution is easier to recontextualize into a new situation. I think it works for Adam Smith as well as the “myths” that have demonstrated staying power.

It might tie into what I take to be your point of view, if one looks at a “myth” as an interconnected pattern of memes, that acts as a filter and focusing agent for new information.

I especially love the feeling I get considering resonance with these value-preserving processes. It seems to me that a deep truth resides in the perspective that evolution leads us towards ever greater manifestations of beauty.

You bring up some good points on intent. I think though at it’s purest form intent is what i call the “I AM” potential. We all share the “I AM’ but what comes after those two words, is the sum total of the variables.

Variables thus are not the intent. A person is their sum total of variables. The intent is to aling those variables in harmony, when you align yourself in harmony, you automatically align yourself with the whole.

thus, intent becomes a alignment of your probabilities with the power of potential.

I AM/POTENTIAL…. A DOCTOR/PROBABILITY, the intent was not to become a doctor, the intent lead to harmonizing one’s gift of becoming a doctor.

I think intent when objectified then loses it’s reason, when intent is to understand your aligning yourself with yourself, a group, a company to produce harmony.

I think we are both pointing at the same reality. My problem with “variables” is they create the notion of a reality that is better captured as “datapoints” moving with a flow. I have a feeling that it’s more like a quanta situation, in that flows can be usefully divided into particles. Particles have the huge advantage of being more easily measured.

Instead of “A person is their sum total of variables.” A person is the observable activity as a consequence of the flows that converge at a point in space and time. In this frame datapoints, like bubbles on the surface of water, or smoke caught in a wind, are what makes flows visible.

Instead of “A person is their sum total of variables.” A person is the observable activity as a consequence of the flows that converge at a point in space and time.

I think what you said here, is spot on with my thoughts on improvisation and complex adaptive systems.

I think this is evident in twitter and other daily activity conversation platforms, i think it ties in well with the thought of user profiles and how relevant they are when asking for a description instead of allowing for the description to surface on its own.

So i agree with you there, when you say I have a feeling that it’s more like a quanta situation, in that flows can be usefully divided into particles. Particles have the huge advantage of being more easily measured

an example of this happening i thinnk is in lists on twitter, if you look at the list people have you under they describe you in a way from your activivties and the percdptions of others.

IN one list someone has me categorized as “civic imagination” in my wild dreams i would have never thought of calling myself this, but obviously something i said, or rt’d or continue to say is tagged as “civic imagination”

These are the user profiles that have relevance.

To address your problem when you said…
My problem with “variables” is they create the notion of a reality that is better captured as “datapoints” moving with a flow.

Thus far i think we agree on your perspective, but what i think sum total of variables the way i describe it is not only to align yourself like you said, but also to come to grips with who you are.

Datapoints moving with a flow, for me is bein in sync with the things we all share, psychology, personality, and coming to grips with certain tendencies.

Spiro/Michael,
I am with you guys on the person is their sum total … the “variables” being their actions, decisions, and observable behavior.

I am still not completely bought off on lists and descriptions on Twitter. And part of the reason being I have seen many a folks having “expert in…”, “guru of..” and many other fancy adjectives but when I really look at their work – it is far less impressive. Still I agree with you (Spiro) that it does have merit and can be mapped to our user-profile task.

Mark,
Thanks for bringing Memehacking blog at http://j.mp/3h7BOp into the convo. Maybe a way to frame Lumines is to frame it as a malignant v life giving memes. Let’s say the unintended consequence of a meme is to create the emergent network that enables the perception of a sub system. At the level of the individual it is the pattern of resistance that acts as the information filter that crowds out other recognition patterns from forming.

At the level of education enterprise, the malignant meme (needs a name) is “these kids are under privileged, They lack X,Y,Z” While “true” it crowds out the useful patterns to focus on what to do now to improve the situation. The lumine might be “What can we give these kids to allow them to grow.”

Once socnets have tools to sense emotional states (e.g. by finding trends in emotional laden tweets), it may be possible to respond with nudges and/or gifts that deflect problems and help spread lumines.

Great blog, with eye-opening links. Another useful reference here would be Grant McCracken’s 2009 book, Chief Culture Officer, in which he argues that organizations need to build skill at the very top in reading trends in popular culture. Steve Jobs is of course a genius at this. But McCracken thinks it’s a learnable skill, one deserving more recognition than it has. Lack of it is costly. An example from the book is the estimated cost to Levi Strauss ($1B?) of missing the implications for jeans styles of the Hip Hop trend.

I’ve haven’t read the entire stream of comments yet, but just wanted to add that doing scanning for strategy development in itself isn’t the main game – you have to do something with the information that you find to demonstrate the value of scanning systems in organisations – this, of course, may be a topic for one of your future posts!

As well as Richard’s paper, the other two key papers I use for environmental scanning are:

Whenever I start a scanning project now with clients, I take them through the four quadrants and discuss with them the need to look at scanning from the perspective of all four areas of activity – so, not just lower right STEEP type scanning, but finding ways to engage staff so that their personal views about the future can be added to the scanning pool, and working to deliver processes for scanning, discussion and strategy development that take into account the organisation’s culture and context. It’s a great framework for getting people to think beyond the tangible, empirical and rational in their scanning approaches.

I’ve produced a couple of scanning resources as I’ve worked through how to position scanning as a must-do activity in organisations – a guide and a webinar download on environmental scanning: what it is and how to do it (http://www.thinkingfuture.net/environmental-scanning).